100 Ways to Change Your Life by Liz Moody

Author:Liz Moody
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

54.

Deepen your existing friendships.

We all want to establish deep, intimate friendships, but sometimes, getting over the acquaintance hump can feel impossible. Even if we’ve created recurring plans and started to benefit from the intimacy formed from spending time together (see here), how do we get from there to late-night-phone-calls, share-all-our-secrets level? It turns out, the scientific community has figured out research-backed ways to create those deep relationships—and that having those deep social connections is critical for feeling good not only in our minds, but also in our bodies.

Dr. Robert Waldinger is the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest study about human lives ever conducted,1 and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Good Life. Over more than eighty years, researchers at Harvard followed the same individuals and their families, conducting thousands of surveys, doing brain scans and blood tests, and trying to get to the root of what makes people thrive. The answer it revealed is simple. “The single strongest predictor of thriving is good relationships with other people,” Dr. Waldinger said when I interviewed him on one of my most downloaded podcast episodes ever. “It’s not just emotional well-being and happiness—it’s physical thriving. It’s staying healthier longer and living longer.”

Good relationships serve as stress-relievers. “Let’s say that I have something really upsetting happen in my day, and I find myself ruminating about it,” Dr. Waldinger explained. “I can feel my heart rate go up, and I can feel myself start to sweat. That’s normal. Our bodies are meant to meet challenges by going into fight-or-flight response. But our bodies are also meant to return to baseline equilibrium when the threat goes away. If I come home and there’s someone to talk to, or someone I can call, I can literally feel my body calm down. Good relationships regulate us. But if we don’t have that person who we can talk to, scientific communities believe we stay in a chronic low-level fight-or-flight mode. We have higher levels of circulating stress hormones and levels of chronic inflammation.”

This is where those research-backed ways to create deep relationships come in. In fact, according to friendship psychologist Dr. Marisa G. Franco, there’s a three-step process to turn friends into closer friends or even best friends—and it’s easier (and far more concrete and straightforward!) than you might imagine.

Step one: Decide whom you want to deepen your relationship with. “A lot of the time, we’re really passive in our social worlds,” said Dr. Franco. We hang out with the people who reach out to us instead of actively seeking out the type of people we want to hang out with (for more on that, see here). Bringing intentionality to your interactions is important for accessing subconscious levels of motivation, so choose a person with qualities you’re actually looking to cultivate in your life. If you want to have a more fun-filled life, choose people who are quick to laugh and have a childlike sense of play. If you want to be pushed intellectually, choose someone who loves to learn and discuss.

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